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Building CLIA for Resource-Scarce African Languages: A Case Study on Oromo—English CLIR

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  • Kula Kekeba Tune

    (International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India)

  • Vasudeva Varma

    (International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India)

Abstract

Since most of the existing major search engines and commercial Information Retrieval (IR) systems are primarily designed for well-resourced European and Asian languages, they have paid little attention to the development of Cross-Language Information Access (CLIA) technologies for resource-scarce African languages. This paper presents the authors' experience in building CLIA for indigenous African languages, with a special focus on the development and evaluation of Oromo-English-CLIR. The authors have adopted a knowledge-based query translation approach to design and implement their initial Oromo-English CLIR (OMEN-CLIR). Apart from designing and building the first OMEN-CLIR from scratch, another major contribution of this study is assessing the performance of the proposed retrieval system at one of the well-recognized international Cross-Language Evaluation Forums like the CLEF campaign. The overall performance of OMEN-CLIR was found to be very promising and encouraging, given the limited amount of linguistic resources available for severely under-resourced African languages like Afaan Oromo.

Suggested Citation

  • Kula Kekeba Tune & Vasudeva Varma, 2015. "Building CLIA for Resource-Scarce African Languages: A Case Study on Oromo—English CLIR," International Journal of Information Retrieval Research (IJIRR), IGI Global, vol. 5(1), pages 48-67, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:igg:jirr00:v:5:y:2015:i:1:p:48-67
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